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Humans Explore: We Are Capable of Greatness, a new short by Space City Films

A new short film by Space City Films beautifully combines images from EFT-1 – the fist test flight of NASA’s Orion capsule on December 5, 2014 – with Carl Sagan’s passage We Humans Are Capable of Greatness.

Turn on the HD and watch:

These are Carl’s words:

We were hunters and foragers, the frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth and the ocean and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little tarraquest globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousand, millions of worlds.

We who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?

By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us.

We’re an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars, it will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, far seeing, capable, and prudent.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallabilities, we humans are capable of greatness.

What new wonders undreamt of in our time will we have wrought in another generation and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century and the next millennium?

Our remote descendants safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified. By their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe, come from Earth.

They will gaze up and strain to find the Blue Dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was.

How perilous our infancy. How humble our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.

– Carl Sagan

It is always remarkable how well Carl captures the contrast between our problems here on the Pale Blue Dot and the potential for what we can accomplish.

The filmmaker, Marc Havican, tweeted that this film is the first in a series he and Space City Films are creating called Humans Explore.

Bio Bit

Harrison lives in Ottawa, Canada. He works in politics and is passionate about many things, including space and exploration. He's worked for a national news outlet, managing the digital products, writing news, and appearing on air to talk about science, technology, and politics. In his spare time he enjoys astronomy, scuba diving, flying airplanes, photography, and sports.